The Duffle Coat Was Built for Gloved Hands on the Arctic Convoys

In March 1942 a radar officer in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve named Ron Knapp sailed for Malta aboard HMS Breconshire, which was attacked during convoy MW10. When HMS Southwold struck a mine, Knapp was pulled from the water by a minesweeper, and, as his daughter later told it, a boatswain handed him a duffle coat. That coat, its maker's label dated 1939 to 1940, is now in the collection of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The museum notes that the Navy List of the period has no boatswain of the name his family remembered, so some of the story may have blurred with time. The coat itself is real, and it explains the whole garment.

A cloth from a Belgian town

The name comes from Duffel, a town in the province of Antwerp in Belgium that gave its name to a thick, coarse wool cloth. Duffel bags were first made from the same stuff. The coat's shape is harder to pin down. Wikipedia's history of the duffel coat suggests the hooded, toggle fastened Polish military frock coat of the 1820s as one possible ancestor, a style that had spread across Europe by 1850. That is a likely story rather than a documented one.

What is documented is the Royal Navy. According to the National Maritime Museum, duffel coats became part of official naval uniform in the late 19th century, worn as foul weather gear by officers and sailors alike. That made the duffle one of very few uniform items that crossed the line between ranks. Wikipedia adds that the Admiralty bought the coats in quantity from several manufacturers in the 1890s and that they were known as convoy coats.

Toggles for frozen hands

The Second World War made the duffle. The Royal Navy issued it to sailors on the Arctic and North Atlantic convoys, the runs that carried supplies to the Soviet Union through some of the coldest water on earth. Every detail of the coat answers to that job. The toggles and long loops could be done up and undone in thick gloves. The hood was cut oversized so it would fit over a naval cap. The wool was heavy, the length reached the knee, and two big patch pockets sat on the front.

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery wore one through the war, and the habit stuck to the coat. In Britain it became the Monty coat, and in Italy, Greece and the Netherlands it is still often called a Montgomery.

Two naval coats, side by side

The National Maritime Museum holds several wartime duffles, and two of its records, read together, show the coat being changed during the war. Both were made by the same maker, Redman Brothers. The comparison is ours.

The museum describes the three toggle front as the early war pattern, later replaced by four. In five years the coat gained a toggle and a different hood fastening, and the 1944 example adds a reinforcement patch on each shoulder. It measures 1,340 millimeters overall, a coat cut long. Nothing on either coat is decorative.

From surplus to the high street

After the war the Admiralty had more duffle coats than it needed. They went out as government surplus, cheap and nearly indestructible, and through the 1950s and 1960s they became a uniform for British students and anyone else who wanted to stay warm on little money.

In 1951 Harold and Freda Morris, who ran a wholesale business in gloves and overalls in London, bought surplus Royal Navy duffles to sell on. That is the origin of the name Gloverall. According to the company's own heritage page, they then commissioned new coats to the same naval pattern. Wikipedia's account adds that Gloverall began making its own version in 1954, with leather fastenings, buffalo horn toggles and a double faced check lining, the template that most civilian duffles still follow. Gloverall opened its own factory in Northamptonshire in 1962, the county better known for the shoes in our Northampton shoemaking guide, and was exporting to Japan, Hong Kong and Australia by 1965. This year it marks its 75th anniversary.

Film and fiction did the rest. Trevor Howard wears an army duffle as Major Calloway in The Third Man in 1949. The racing driver Tony Brooks was photographed in a Gloverall Monty at the Monaco Grand Prix in 1957. And in 1958 Michael Bond dressed his bear Paddington in a duffle coat, which is why for many people the toggle coat will always belong to him.

Wearing one now

The duffle sits in the same family as the trench coat and the Barbour wax jacket, military and working garments that civilians adopted because nothing else did the job as well. Most duffles today are made from Melton wool rather than true duffel cloth. Look for real horn or wood toggles on leather or rope, a lining that is sewn in rather than glued, and a hood big enough to pull over a hat, because that was the point.

Wear it the way it was meant to be worn, over thick knitwear like an Aran sweater, with the toggles done up on the days that need them. Size it to fit over that sweater. The coat was designed for men who could not afford to be cold. For more, see the whole Style section.